Chương 222: Chapter 201: Two Volunteers Are Better Than One

[Time]: Autumn Semester, Day 3 — 2: 00 PM [Location]: West Campus · Yggdrasil Academy · Potions Hall & Compounding Dispensary & Testing Ground Hathaway slid onto a bench near the front, unpacked her quills, and registered a full beat late that the party had split. No Victoria at her left elbow, silently correcting the angle of her spine. No Spectra in the row ahead, radiating the ambient temperature of an open grave.

Just the near end of the row, and Surtrina, sprawled into it with a thin curl of orange smoke lifting off her collar, cracking her tail against the leg of the desk on a slow, bored metronome. First class all week I'm running solo with Surtrina, Hathaway's thread noted, uncapping her ink. She side-eyed her seatmate, who was flicking a spark off her thumbnail with the serene disinterest of a girl who had never in her life feared a consequence. Front row, unsupervised, two hours.

The podium had not been empty for some time. Hathaway, sitting dead center of the front row with her threat arrays passively sweeping the room, was among the first of the forty-three to notice, and even she caught it a full beat late. The realization rippled backward through the tiers, row by row, until the whole hall had gone silent around a woman none of them had seen arrive.

Roxanne wore a court gown of antique black velvet that drank the light, structured high at the collar with mid-century boning, immaculate and unmarked by a speck of dust. A wide, lavish bonnet framed her face in falling tiers of black lace. Black lace gloves ran to her fingertips, every seam drawn tight. Beneath the bonnet's shadow her eyes were two flat coins of leaden silver, pupil-less, catchlight-less, staring out at a hall they did not appear to have registered as containing people.

And in total defiance of the funeral she was dressed for, warmth poured off her skin: the soft gold of sun through an autumn orchard, sanctified and unblemished, and where it touched the students the damp chill clinging to their coats dissolved into clean, sweet air. Up in the corner of the vaulted ceiling, a petty scrap of residual grudge left behind by some over-stressed senior in the previous hour flickered once, drifted into her airspace, turned a watery grey, and popped out of existence without time to scream.

That is Spectra's mother, Hathaway's cross-reference supplied, and she sat with the whole inverted absurdity of it. Same bloodline. Opposite firmware on the exact same hardware.

"Potions," Roxanne said. Her voice arrived flat, perfectly metered, a wax cylinder turning inside an empty phonograph, with no inflection laid down to cushion the landing.

"The word descends from the oldest Rikish root: melt them into juice, and cast the bone within." She did not blink.

"In that usage, them is the magical flora, and bone is the harvested material of monstrous fauna. That is the genesis of the entire discipline. The forced marriage of plant tissue and beast residue, held under thermal assault until it agrees to become one thing." Hathaway's quill scratched the definition down on pure reflex. Roxanne raised one gloved hand, and a slim vial resolved between her fingers, its contents a pale, effervescent gold threaded with tiny feather-shaped flecks of pulp.

Even at range it gave off a faint phantom impression of mischief, the visual equivalent of a small animal that had already decided to bite you.

"Today's module is the Foxification Potion. An original formulation." A pause with nothing behind it.

"Synthesized in my laboratory yesterday evening." A silent shockwave rolled through the amphitheater. She brewed a brand-new A2 transformation matrix last night and carried it in this morning as a warm-up demo. Hathaway's developer brain logged the input and immediately reclassified it. That is a day-one patch dropped straight to a live server, and we are the beta pool.

The privilege of a Grandmaster casually handing a room of second-years a proprietary formula still warm from the crucible hung heavy over the desks.

"To the dispensary," Roxanne said, turning her faceless bonnet toward the side door.

"Move." The compounding dispensary was an immaculate white chamber chilled to a shivering seventeen degrees, the air scrubbed to medical-grade ethanol and ozone by wash-filters recessed into the ceiling. A high-pressure sterilization threshold stripped particulate contamination at the molecular level before a single boot crossed it, so the entire dress code came down to a pair of thin solvent-resistant gloves.

Technically even those were redundant, but every alchemist alive carried the same low-grade compulsion about bare skin on raw reagents, and nobody had ever tried to talk them out of it. Hathaway snapped hers tight and claimed the station beside Surtrina.

"We begin with material preparation," Roxanne said, her mechanical voice cutting clean through the hum of the filters.

"The White Steed Mushrooms. Using the Sharon Curie method. You will not touch the material with mana. You will purge the mana from your own body entirely. Like this." She closed her eyes. The golden warmth guttered and went out with the rest of her, the sanctified light collapsing back into ordinary shadow, and what remained looked less like a practitioner than a very well-dressed corpse propped upright behind a desk.

"Direct your focus inward," she said, silver eyes opening onto nothing.

"Take hold of the cardiac rhythm. Surrender the mana-assisted pulse. Empty the thought, let the heartbeat decouple from the reservoir, and return the shell to plain mortal function." Hathaway closed her eyes and tried to pry her heartbeat off her mana pool. The two turned out to be co-compiled somewhere so deep in her autonomic layer that separating them felt like reclaiming salt from seawater it had already been baked into. Her first attempt did nothing at all.

Her heart kept thudding on its high-output enchanted pump, sublimely indifferent to the eviction notice.

"The heart of a Witch leans heavily on ambient mana to assist its beat," Roxanne said, laying a gloved hand flat over her own chest.

"Sever that feed. Command the magical rhythm to stop. Command the flesh to keep going without it." The undead lady would like the living to please switch off their circulatory systems, Hathaway thought, her mouth twitching. Easy note to give from the far side of that particular bridge. She drew a slow breath, sank past the surface noise, and dropped the hammer. Gravity doubled. Her knees went, and both palms slammed the steel bench to keep her upright.

The hyper-oxygenated air of the pristine room turned abruptly thin and grey and difficult to drag past her teeth. Her vision narrowed at the edges, her skin went a translucent, unhealthy white, and a hot, involuntary tear welled at the corner of one eye and spilled over her lash line before she could stop it. Stripped of the mana pool that normally kept her blood over-charged, her purely human biology sat there wheezing under the weight of her own body.

Beside her Surtrina hissed a sharp, insulted lungful of air, red hair going damp at the temple, demonic presence collapsed into one exhausted teenager gripping a countertop. It had taken her two tries. Roxanne surveyed a room of the civilization's most lethal sophomores reduced to gasping, teary-eyed mortals, and pressed a rune on the wall.

The ventilation arrays surged, flooding the chamber with a crisp rush of hyper-oxygenated air, and the crushing weight lifted enough for Hathaway to pull one full, stabilizing breath, her color crawling back as her mortal lungs latched onto the enriched atmosphere.

"Recovery time acceptable," Roxanne noted, and moved on as if nothing near-fatal had occurred.

"The standard grips mirror the surgical theater. The Bow, the Pen, the Full-Grip, and the Reverse-Pick. The Sharon Curie school defaults to the Bow and the Reverse-Pick." Hathaway dragged a White Steed Mushroom onto her board. The White Steed Mushroom: thick meaty cap, a bright cheerful coloration that screamed neurotoxin in the wild and delivered, instead, mild regenerative buffs if you ate it raw. Notoriously fussy to process, which was why most Witches gave up and just dropped it whole into a stew.

Roxanne's scalpel was already moving. A blur of silver carved a deep, flawless V into her own mushroom's cap.

"The Craniotomy," she said.

"The most common extraction in the Curie school. A rapid V, drawn so the blade avoids the moisture sacs while the flap holds perfect structural integrity. The geometry of that single cut, per species, could fill a textbook. This specimen is simple. A blunt Craniotomy will serve." She held up the sliced cap.

"Read through physical reality, the V concentrates the material's latent potential. Read through mystical theory, it is the opening of the skull to receive wisdom and enlightenment, priming the cellular matrix to accept a foreign variable without rejecting it. Hence the name." Hathaway matched the Pen grip, leaned on nothing but the muscle memory a summer of runework and glassware had drilled into her fingers, and drove the blade. Slash. Left. Right.

The V opened, its right arm dipping two millimeters below the left, the flap holding clean enough to pass an inspector who was squinting.

"Satisfactory," Roxanne said, already drifting past. The fox ears were another order of magnitude. Dense with cartilage, fine nerve, and a lattice of micro-vessels still carrying dried beast mana, they demanded the golden secretion be drawn without rupturing a single vessel wall, under zero-mana conditions, on human touch alone. Hathaway set down the scalpel, took up a micro-dissection blade, and threaded the vascular maze with slow, deliberate precision. Her hands, thank the graft, already knew the motion.

That very morning she had knelt in Cosette's conservatory and seamed a barbed taproot into a living host's carotid without nicking the subclavian, and the fox ears were mercifully less inclined to look back at her while she worked. Running it all on a plain mortal stamina bar left her shoulders burning and her forehead slick, but the seam came clean.

Across the aisle, Yenna stood at her own station in absolute stillness, golden fox ears rotating a degree to track the ambient noise, small hands lifting the vessels out of a severed pair of fox ears with the unhurried patience of a surgeon working on a relative. The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings. Hathaway's memory helpfully queued the custom fox-ear headphones Yenna had gifted her.

The ones whose fluffiness had been confirmed through direct, un-consented field testing of Yenna's own biological source material. Do not watch, she instructed herself, dragging her gaze back down. Look at the crucible. At the front, Roxanne began to blend, and her hands blurred at the edges without a shred of mana to explain the speed. Golden secretion off the ears, colorless solvent off the opened skull, a third catalyst folded in during a half-second window while the silver spoon was still mid-rotation.

Hathaway's processing thread nearly dropped a frame trying to log the sequence, and there would be no second explanation. Registering the glassy-eyed room, Roxanne exhaled a hollow, ghostly sigh and throttled her execution from Grandmaster down to a brisk, theoretically-trackable Expert. Under that mercy the potion finalized, sealed and settling in its glass.

Hathaway hard-coded color, viscosity, bubble rate, and component order into memory with the discipline of a developer screenshotting a fatal error log a half-second before the reboot ate it.

"Begin," Roxanne said. Hathaway failed three times. The first batch curdled to brown sludge. The second flashed off into vapor. The third detonated into a cloud of drifting glitter that smelled aggressively of wet dog and coated her left glove. On the fourth, the thermal gradient held, the clear fluid accepted the golden resin, and the vial went pale gold with feather-pulp turning lazily through the bubbles. And yet, staring at it, her instinct threw an amber flag.

The hue leaned a fraction too far toward amber, and the bubbles rose in an erratic, off-tempo syncopation that a clean brew would never permit. A shadow fell across the bench. Roxanne stood beside her, those lightless silver coins angled down into the vial, radiating a flat, suffocating pressure that made Hathaway want to apologize for existing.

"Professor," she ventured, tight.

"Is there a structural defect in this output?"

"This potion was born of a laboratory accident," Roxanne stated, without inflection. As she spoke, a draft from the ceiling wash-filters caught the heavy lace of her bonnet, lifting it just enough to expose the shadow underneath. The two oversized black velvet bows Hathaway had catalogued earlier did not merely stir in the breeze. They swiveled, independently, and locked onto the faint hiss of a burner three rows back. Hathaway's gaze dropped on pure horrified reflex.

Beneath the immaculate, floor-sweeping hem of the mourning gown, the thick tip of a black fox tail slipped free, swished once against the pristine floorboards, and was yanked back out of sight with the same violent, wordless urgency of someone slamming a laptop shut on an incriminating tab. She didn't just brew the alpha build last night, Hathaway's logic engine compiled, the pieces falling into place like a server rack going down mid-shift. She field-tested it on herself. And the buff still hasn't timed out.

"That dictates an unstable property matrix," Roxanne continued, her dead-eyed composure entirely unbothered by the exposure, one black ear pinning flat against her skull in a small, private show of aggravation.

"Duration decay and physical manifestation parameters remain volatile. Such variables cannot be charted without a sufficient sample size." Hathaway's stomach went into freefall. The ghost Grandmaster was crowdsourcing her own patch notes from inside a body still running the bug.

"... So?" Roxanne reached into the deep folds of her mourning gown and drew out a flawless grey Resurrection Stone on a fine silver wire. She pressed it into Hathaway's palm and closed the girl's fingers around it, with the gentle, unyielding firmness of an undertaker arranging a corpse's hands into their final pose.

"Try it," Roxanne said.

"And find out." Hathaway looked at the extra life stapled to her hand, then at the sketchy, off-tempo vial brewed by a ghost with the emotional bandwidth of a filing cabinet. If it compiles, it ships. She popped the cork, tipped her head back, and drank the whole thing in one aggressive pull. It tasted of warm copper and wet fur. For three seconds, nothing. Then a sharp pop fired at the base of her spine and her scalp lit up. Good news: the core logic executed.

Two tall, obscenely soft, red-gold fox ears erupted from the top of her head, twitching against the air currents, hauling in every hum of the ventilation and every scrape of a boot at four hundred percent gain. Bad news: the unstable matrix expressed itself as a runaway loop in the appendage module. Six enormous, aggressively fluffy tails exploded from her tailbone and fanned out across the aisle, eating up floor space that had been comfortable a second ago.

One lashed left on its own initiative and swept a rack of volumetric flasks off the shelf in a bright cascade of shattering crystal.

"Oops," Hathaway wheezed, a full octave up. Surtrina took one look at the six-tailed configuration and folded, pointing, roaring with laughter.

"Look at you! You're a multi-port router! A six-tailed fire hazard!" Roxanne did not blink. Her gloved hand flicked out at viper speed, plucked Surtrina's own finished vial off the rack, thumbed the cork, and drove the rim between Surtrina's laughing teeth.

"Two volunteers are consistently more informative than one," Roxanne stated. Surtrina choked, swallowed half of it, coughed up a spark, and then her jaw snapped shut as her head kicked back. Her jagged demonic horns shrank and smoothed. Her heavy, scaled reptilian tail puffed up with explosive velocity into one massive, fiery-red brush, and the abyssal runes across her skin dissolved and re-drew themselves in a leaner, more cunning vulpine sweep, a pattern nothing like Hathaway's.

"A Balor variant," Roxanne observed, registering exactly zero surprise.

"The regenerative property of the White Steed Mushroom, interacting with the abyssal flame core. Noted." Surtrina stared down at her new brush, a tongue of blue-white fire licking her teeth.

"What in the abyss is this." Hathaway did not get to laugh. One of her rogue tails whipped around and caught Surtrina square across the cheek.

"Ow! Watch it!"

"I'm not doing it!" Hathaway shrieked, both hands scrabbling after the appendages. Two of them had begun trying to braid themselves together while a third made a serious attempt on her left boot. Another tail looped itself around Surtrina's crimson brush and tied the two of them into a thrashing knot of fur.

"Let go, you have to let go, I have a girlfriend," Hathaway panicked, sweat running, wrenching at the tangle.

"I cannot be seen knotting tails with you, this is a diplomatic incident waiting to happen!"

"It's your damn tail that won't quit grabbing mine!" Surtrina roared, hauling backward.

"Let go! Ow! You hit me again!" Around them, the rest of the class took one careful look at the tangled, furry catastrophe in the front row and began a slow, silent tactical retreat toward the exit. The main doors sealed with a soft, holy chime before the first retreating boot reached them. Roxanne had not so much as turned around.

"For the sake of scientific rigor," she announced, "the class will now consume their yields." A flat glance swept the shattered flask rack, the floor-to-ceiling glassware, the sterilization arrays humming along the walls. She tipped her bonnet toward the one door she had left unsealed, a narrow side exit.

"The testing ground." Cut off from every other way out, the class filed through the side door and down a short flight of stairs into a wide, reinforced yard open to the sky. Only once the dispensary's fragile inventory was sealed safely behind them did Roxanne move down the ranks like a mechanized reaper, tipping vials past teeth with soft, apathetic efficiency.

She cornered Yenna too, on the flat note that observing a natural-born fox witch metabolize an artificial foxification matrix constituted a premium comparative data point. Inside five minutes the testing ground was a localized petting zoo. Hathaway ran a rapid self-diagnostic.

The potion registered as, undeniably, a fat buff: strength and agility both spiked, a latent fire-summoning attribute now humming warm in her fingertips, and, glancing down, a subtle but mathematically verifiable adjustment to her chest sliders. An overall enhancement package wearing a cosmetic patch as a disguise. For Surtrina it read as catastrophe: bicycle tires bolted onto a battle tank, one of the strongest bloodlines on the server nerfed down to a fox.

For Yenna, whose base lineage was already fox, it landed as a temporary evolution, wrapping her in an aura of quiet, dignified power. The unlisted side effect spared no one. The fox traits arrived bundled with a feral zoomie overload, and the yard dissolved into flying fur, students bouncing off the reinforced walls, chasing each other's tails, swatting with abandon. Hathaway was losing the war with her own anatomy on every front. A single tail demanded a dedicated cognitive thread.

She had six, and four independent threads. Her CPU was openly smoking, routing frantic motor commands to limbs that refused to acknowledge standard physics, her tails spinning like six unsynchronized helicopter rotors and slapping anyone who strayed within three feet. Only Surtrina held her ground at Hathaway's shoulder, and not out of loyalty: every time a rogue tail caught her, the crimson brush slapped it right back.

"Yenna!" Hathaway yelled over the din, wrestling three tails into a headlock.

"How do you control these?!" Yenna flicked her own elegant tails through a slow, complex, undulating wave, the kind of thing that looked like fluid dynamics and taught precisely nothing. It was a fish demonstrating, in good faith, how to breathe water. Then, tail tip perking, she offered the textbook answer.

"The only reliable way to still an involuntary reflex," she recited, "is to have someone hold them firmly at the base." Hathaway went pale and shook her head so hard her ears flapped. Absolutely not. If Victoria walks in and finds a stranger holding my tails, I will not need the Resurrection Stone, because there will not be enough of me left to fill a matchbox. At the podium Roxanne swept the bedlam with her silver eyes and logged the chaotic telemetry into a small ledger with deep, silent satisfaction.

"Record your individual duration decay," she told a room of brawling foxes.

"Submit the data Wednesday. Dismissed." [Time]: Autumn Semester, Day 3 — 4: 15 PM [Location]: West Campus · Yggdrasil Academy · Courtyard It took twenty minutes of psychological preparation before Hathaway and Surtrina worked up the nerve to walk out. Surtrina's fox ears were pinned flat against her skull, broadcasting an aura of total, crushing defeat. Hathaway did no better, checking over her shoulder every few steps to confirm her six tails were not decapitating a statue.

They had not cleared the first courtyard archway before they froze. Victoria and Spectra were walking up the path. Victoria stopped. Her eyes widened, the immaculate Wellington firmware fracturing for one clean second as her pale gaze traveled from the twitching red-gold ears, down the six thrashing tails, and across to Surtrina's crimson brush and pinned-back ears. Hathaway delivered the whole sorry sequence in a rushed, stammering report.

Spectra listened, her expression shifting into something intensely complicated, cataloguing her mother's handiwork without a word. Then, she reached into her robe and produced a high-end magi-tech camera. Where did she even compile that item from?! Hathaway's spike of panic misfired straight down her compromised spine, and one tail shot out on its own, lashing toward the lens.

Victoria's hand came up and closed around it out of the air, effortless, and then, with the natural, unhurried grace of a predator that had already won, her gloved fingers settled into the fur at the base and began, rhythmically, to stroke. A localized jolt of pure serotonin dropped straight into Hathaway's already-compromised nervous system, and her knees came very close to buckling. Click. Flash.

Spectra drew the printed photograph out of the camera: a limited-edition, ultra-rare capture of Fox-Hathaway looking utterly compromised under her girlfriend's hand, with a profoundly depressed Fox-Surtrina sulking in the background. She handed it to Victoria, who glanced at it, let a razor-thin, deeply pleased smile touch her mouth, and filed the blackmail into her inner jacket pocket.

"Why," Hathaway muttered, ears twitching with resentment, "are we the only two who had to become foxes." Victoria's smile lifted a fraction of a millimeter, her fingers never pausing in the fur.

"Thank you both for your invaluable contributions to the advancement of science." Something in Surtrina snapped. The Balor-fox lowered her head, a dark shadow falling across her face.

"Actually," she growled, voice dropping an octave.

"I still have a spare batch." Her head came up, fangs bared in a manic grin.

"Suffer with us. Come be foxes." She lunged, the glass raised like a dagger. Spectra regarded the incoming charge with flat, foregone patience, and phased out of physical reality. Surtrina's tackle sailed clean through her translucent torso. As the Balor stumbled past, Spectra's corporeal hand materialized just long enough to lift the vial from her grip and flicked it lightly into the air. Victoria caught it one-handed, her other hand still comfortably buried in Hathaway's tail. Hathaway looked at the vial.

Looked at her girlfriend.

"?" Victoria slid the potion into the same pocket as the photograph, the aristocratic composure fully restored, the air around her humming with an excellent and frankly predatory mood.

"Let's go, girlfriend," she said. Hathaway stared at the pocket where a full dose of Foxification Potion now sat beside her own incriminating portrait, and a cold, specific sweat broke across the back of her neck. What, exactly, is she planning to do with that.